Technical Approach of an Old Wisdom…

With the recent launch of Google Place Search on October 27, 2010, the SEO community has been uneasy on how their sites would perform. I’ve seen few of our client sites dropping from Position 1 to Page 3 results, while some have retained its first page rankings.

We have done some few research and found out that Place search do still use some major Google Organic Ranking signals in its algorithm — still factoring in the number of inbound links, anchor text, link authority and some basic onpage factors such as title tag. Without official confirmation from Google, this is nothing but pure speculations –no different from “bounce rate” conjecture as a ranking signal.

I’ve been in contact with a client’s developer this past few days regarding URL rewrites of plain old *.html files to *.aspx. The SEO principle involve in this is pretty simple, “301 redirect all old *.html pages to each equivalent new *.aspx pages”. This is pretty tricky and requires more advance coding skills and familiarity with server side scripting, but once implemented properly, you don’t have to worry about URL rewrites affecting your search engine rankings.

Why use 301 redirect?
There are several types of redirects to choose from, but 301 redirect which stands for “permanent redirection” transfers link power from the old pages to new pages.